


We were Girls

by Skippee



Category: Front Lines - Michael Grant
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 15:33:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18413543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skippee/pseuds/Skippee
Summary: "We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them."Rio and Jenou return to Gedwell Falls after the war, but it's not the same town they left, and maybe they've changed too.





	We were Girls

When Jenou Castain walked into this war, she didn’t expect to walk back out.  Sure, at the beginning she had some hope of it, before they all realized that the powers that be intended to send male and female recruits into the fray equally.  That dream went up in smoke with the jokes about a simple job and a simpler romance. Her Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome didn’t feel the need to make himself known either.  

Walk out she does, in the end. Sort of. The doctors had made her promise to keep weight off her bad leg for at least another six weeks, but eventually they gave their blessing to ship home with the rest of her unit.  She suspects that the nurses had something to do with it, exasperated with her role as Fraternizer in Chief and procurer of drink (courtesy of one Rio Richlin). Rio, newly minted Master Sergeant Richlin, is kept busy most days hopping between the evac hospital and the nearby Army Airfield serving as a cattle pen of sorts for soldiers anxious to get home.  Jack Stafford spends three weeks in the same hospital, and Jenou isn’t so damaged she can’t see the real reason Rio stops by so often.

Jenou, though ready to get out of this damned hospital with its same four walls day in and day out, is somewhat less excited by the prospect of a cold apartment in Gedwell Falls or a downright frigid house in Oakland.  Miraculously, Rio solves it in an instant. “By the way, you’re coming to stay at the farm with me when we get home,” she says one day over a hand of cards, almost as an afterthought.

Jenou looks at her skeptically.

“It’s obvious.  You can’t climb the stairs to an apartment every day, and your mother sure as hell can’t carry you.  Plus, we have an empty bedroom.” She hesitates. “That is, if you want to.”

Damn that girl and her sensibility.  It made sulking difficult. “It’d only be a short while,” Jenou relents, “I don’t want to be in the way.”

“You know they’d love to have you as long as you want to stay. Don’t be stupid,” Rio shot back.

And that was that. 

 

Stafford stops by the ladies’ ward early one morning, by this point an expert at dodging the nurses’ rounds,  with a stack of papers in one hand and a rucksack in the other. “Got my orders,” he sighs. “Take care of yourself, Castain.”

“You’re not waiting for Rio?”

His expression darkens.  “I don’t know why you think that would matter.   _ Sarge _ and I said our goodbyes.”

This earns him a raised eyebrow, but she leaves it alone.  Rio, on the other hand, is ready to have kittens when she arrives an hour later.  “He was supposed to be with the rest of the platoon! I have orders; we’re shipping out!”

 

_ Captain _ Schulterman (the promotion surprises exactly no one) sends them on their way with the rest of the 119th, and though none were too thrilled with the idea of another two weeks shoved in a ship like sardines, at least they are together.  Mostly. Rio fights the middle-aged corporal driving the truck the entire way to the dock to go back and find Stafford, but the corporal wins in the end. 

“Lady, if he didn’t tell ya where he was off to, he ain’t worth it,” he advises.

“ _ Sergeant,” _ she hisses.

 

She spends the first half of the trip moping but seems to perk up after Geer and Beebee stir up a little too much trouble in the officers’ mess and she gets to order them around again.

“If I never see another sergeant in my life, it’ll be too many,” grumbles BeeBee.

 

Jenou is confined to her bunk for most of the first several days.  The hospital discharged her in a wheelchair, but it’s fit for neither the narrow passages of the ship nor the numerous hatches crossing every path. Beebee had scrounged a crutch from God knows where so that she at least get to the head on her own and retain some sense of dignity.  Even if she could get away with standing on her bad leg, she’s not sure she’s strong enough to handle the pitching of the ship for more than a few steps. She tries to read the few books Rio’s dropped off and proof the pages she’s typed, but it’s too gloomy to see much, and her handwriting is atrocious in the swaying of the bunk.  By the afternoon of day four, when she’s ready to positively die of boredom, she decides it’s worth the risk.  _ If I can survive being frozen, hungry, filthy, bored, and shot-at, all at the same time, surely I can take a fugging walk _ , she tells herself.  She stands and props herself on the crutch and the wall, hobbles to the first hatch, and promptly falls on her face when the ship gives a sudden lurch, but at least she gets to the other side in the process.  The next hatch is somewhat more graceful; this time she braces her back on the wall and rotates herself through the opening one piece at a time. The stairs prove more daunting yet, and the foot of her crutch gets caught several times in the grate on the steps.  Finally, sweating and breathless, she arrives on the deck. She doesn’t dare approach the railing, but it’s enough to be out of the smelly, gray confines of the berth. 

Even on this relatively calm day, waves splash up the ships’ sides and leave a fine mist in the air. It’s just enough to leave everyone damp enough to be uncomfortable, but not so wet that it’s worth going back below deck.

Rio shows up a few minutes later when another unit’s corporal snitches on her.  Jenou lets her cluck and fret for a few minutes before cutting in. “Rio, honey, I’m either getting out of bed, or you can take me straight to the madhouse when we get stateside.”  Rio huffs in protest, but she says no more about it except to talk Geer into carrying Jenou on the stairs from now on. 

“Aw come on, Richlin, do I look like a mule to you?”

“I always see an ass when I look at you.”

He grumbles a response, but she spends the next several days playing cards and killing time with Rio, “Milkmaid” Molina, “Sweetheart” Chester (now known as such only in jest; he’s long since atoned for that mistake, and now a corporal to boot), Beebee, and a spare private called Brick that Molina seems to have adopted somewhere along the way.  

“Short for Brickman,” he says upon introduction when she joins their game.  “Jonathan Brickman. Or as in, ‘swims like a-’. Take your pick. I had a rough first landing.”

“I was thinking more like, ‘dumb as a bag of-’. Especially if you think I won’t catch you cheating like that,” scoffs Molina.

“I was picking up my lighter! Nobody wants to see your crummy cards anyway!”

 

The bickering continues nonsensically and without any real malice until an equally egregious crime is committed and the cycle begins again.  The light in the enlisted mess and on deck is substantially better than in bunks below, and they pass around Jenou’s pages of typed notes to pass time between games.  “You ought to put this in a book,” says Brick, wide-eyed, after his fifth page of the day. Having just turned eighteen the past autumn, he had missed all but the very end of the action and was still in awe of the rather experienced company he’d been keeping.

She shrugs.  “We’ll see.”

“No, really!  I’ve got an uncle in publishing in New York; I bet he’d love to see this.  Y’know, the fellas at home didn’t believe there were actually girls at the front.”  He waves a fistful of pages for emphasis. “This is the real deal!”

She tells him she’ll think about it, and the conversation wanders back to the card game.

 

When they finally make port in Virginia, there’s practically a stampede to get off the ship.  After an hour of jostling and several trodden-on toes for only a few feet of progress, Rio declares the whole operation FUBAR and plunks herself back on an empty bunk to wait out the crowds.  This is obviously for Jenou’s benefit, and she wants to take a jab at the molly-coddling, but in truth, her leg is throbbing and she’s thankful for the break. 

Several hours later, they’re standing on American soil once again. They take a deep breath of fresh air practically in unison.  After a few moments, Geer declares, “I am absolutely fa-mished! How would you girls care for a hamburger with yours truly?” He waggles his eyebrows, “Never had a date with three at once before.”  

Brick, Sweetheart, and Beebee protest at being left out, while Rio protests his  _ complete _ lack of decorum for a  _ sergeant _ in the United States Army.  

Geer blows a raspberry to cut her off.  “I ain’t a sergeant any more than you now, Richlin.  I’m a free man! Now do you guys want some chow or not?” 

The prospect of a hot meal that isn’t ship food wins out over righteous indignation, though not without mild threats of dismemberment for anything  _ improper _ (Rio) and getting out in time to make the last train north (Beebee).  

“If it’s a date, you’re buying,” Jenou says sweetly.

“Fug you, Castain.”

 

At the train station, they say their goodbyes and exchange addresses on scraps from the blank pages at the end of Jenou’s journal.  Beebee and Brick head north, Geer heads south, and Jenou, Rio, Molina, and Chester wait on the next train to Chicago with the hundreds of other GIs doing what they do best: sleep, smoke, and complain. 

Chester splits off from the group in Chicago.  Rio shakes his hand solemnly. “Good work, Chester.  You take care of yourself out there.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”  He grins. “God, it’s amazing.  I never have to say that again. Call me up if you’re ever in the neighborhood of St. Louie.”  With a tip of his cap, he’s swept into the crowd and out of sight.

 

Rio’s rag-tag band of soldiers has dwindled to three.  Perhaps, someday, they would all meet up again. They stare at each other, each pondering this in her own way, when a slow smile spreads across Molina’s face.  “Look at us. What’s a couple pretty country girls to do with a whole night in the big city?”

“Sleep in a real bed with real sheets,” sighs Rio at the same time Jenou corrects, “You mean two pretty girls and one real dish, if she wasn’t a cripple.”

“Oh, liven up, Rio.  We’re doing something fun tonight.  Question is, what?” 

“Well dancing is out,” says Jenou. “I absolutely refuse to take Rio’s two left feet through another step ever again.”

“Oh yeah, I’m the problem.”

 

They stumble back to the station the next morning and they’re off again, rolling over the rivers and plains of the midwest and barrelling toward home.  They’re still in uniform, which earns a variety of nods and disapproving looks, and an occasional salute, as other passengers pass through the car at every stop.

Hours later, Molina slouches in her seat with her cap pulled low over her eyes.  Jenou’s notebook lay open on her lap, but she finds herself staring out the window with Rio instead.  They’re in the mountains now, and the sunset lights up the snowy peaks in gentle pink hues. The view is bittersweet, though, tinged with the worry (no, the realization, if she’s truly honest with herself) that life in tiny Gedwell Falls will always feel… lacking if she never leaves California again.  

Maybe that was the true nightmare here, that they would go home and everything would be as if they never left.  Part of her wanted to believe it could be true, that they could leave behind the the killing and the screaming and the days of soul-crushing boredom, but the other part, the part that slogged through mud and burned in the desert and slept through artillery fire and  _ survived _ told her to embrace it with her head held high.  If the gentle folks of Gedwell Falls didn’t like it,  _ tough shit _ .

 

“Do you think it’s changed?” asks Rio after a while.

“Nothing ever changes in Gedwell Falls.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This series holds a special place in my heart, and I'm so excited to continue the story. I'd love to meet more fans of the series, so drop me a note below or find me on tumblr at @annabreaksthings!


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